Hello all,

For the last year, I’ve been publishing a shorter version of this newsletter - one headline, and the Media News list - for the Media Reform Coalition. Because I’m finding it difficult to keep up this extended PPC version alongside my new job, I’m going to continue the MRC version only.

I will occasionally post funny/silly/interesting bits and bobs here, so please stay subscribed if you’re interested. If you’d like to continue receiving media news fortnightly, sign up for the newsletter for free on the mediareform.org.uk homepage.

Thanks for all your support over the last couple of years! I’d love to hear from you, drop me a line @elizmizon ❤️

The beginning of the end for broadcast TV?

This week has been a key juncture in the industry-wide move from broadcast to online television.

BBC Director General Tim Davie announced that the BBC could be online-only within a decade. Sky News’ John Ryley, CEO since 2006, is stepping down amid a move toward the channel’s “post-TV future”, which has seen it pause new TV studio projects in favour of digital expansion.

Davie’s speech to the Royal Television Society embraced a feeling of inevitability; he stated a “switch-off of broadcast will and should happen over time, and we should be active in planning for it.”

The plan to bring all BBC services “together in a single offer […] could ultimately see the end of distinct brands such as BBC One or BBC Radio 4, although the programmes they currently air could continue online”, according to Guardian media editor Jim Waterson.

A day later, ITV launched its new streamer ITVX, to replace the ITV Hub, for which it claims to have a “more-than-TV” strategy (which appears to just mean ‘also films’.)

One of its flagship programmes is the teen drama Tell Me Everything, which explores young peoples’ worsening mental health in an age of digital addiction and confusion. As we travel ever further into our increasingly online existence, better strategies for mitigating the worst excesses of the (small and/or big M) metaverse are crucial.

It’s Sunday 11th December 2022

Media News

• The Tory party appears to have dropped its plans to privatise Channel 4, after culture secretary Michelle Donelan announced they are discussing new funding models “that could enable it to avoid privatisation […] Plans to sell the state-owned broadcaster are widely expected to be abandoned, although officially ministers say they are still considering all options.” (The Guardian)

• The BBC has appointed Sir Damon Buffini, a well known private equity chief, as its deputy chair. The corporation is under pressure to better its ‘commercial focus’ as the government pursues funding options other than the license fee. (The Guardian)

• More than 1,100 unionised journalists at the New York Times staffers went on strike for a 24 hour period this week, leaving editors “scrambling to put out a credible digital report for the day and print editions for the days following”. Members of the Freelance Solidarity Project who write for NYT joined them. (NPR/The Nation)

• Al Jazeera have filed a case at the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli forces over the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Aqla, who was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier in May. Israel, which does not recognise the ICC, says her death was unintentional. (BBC)

• BuzzFeed is cutting 180 of its non-editorial staff, 12% of its total workforce. The media company cites “challenging economic conditions, its acquisition of Complex Networks and an ongoing audience shift to short-form, vertical video” as the precursor to the decision. (CNBC)

• As a result of its dispute with Apple over app fees, Twitter has announced to staff it may charge customers $11 a month for Twitter Blue subscriptions through Twitter’s iPhone app, but only $8 for subscriptions through the web. (The Information)

• Reach plc, the UK’s biggest news publisher, has confirmed it’s launching US operations for the Mirror, Express and Irish Star in the new year. (Press Gazette)

• Amazon is offering customers $2 a month to let the company monitor the traffic on their phones to improve “personalized-ad experiences”. (Insider)

• Harry and Meghan have released a statement, rebutting criticisms of hypocrisy regarding their new Netflix documentary and accusing the UK media of again peddling a distorted narrative. The UK media have spiraled into a frenzy of outrage regarding the couple’s decision to share their story, and personal photographs, if they left the country to seek privacy; they’ve said that they cited a desire to continue their duties in their original statement, and these distortions themselves, not privacy, was their reason for leaving. (The Guardian)

Campaigns + Content

Harkening back to Facebook’s 2021 Australian news blackout before the country imposed the Big Tech tax (i.e. the News Bargaining Code), Meta again threatened to remove news content from its platforms this week after the US followed in Oz’s legislative footsteps with the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA).

However, some experts think that, not unlike the Australian system, the law will not really do what it needs to. For example, “the bill exclude[s] publishers with more than 1,500 employees, which consists of the three major newspapers in the U.S.: the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. But it also excludes organizations with less than $100,000 in revenue, which would shut out some small-town outlets as well as some nonprofit and niche local news organizations doing some of the most innovative work in creating a sustainable local news model.”

Read more from media sociologist Jeremy Littau:

Congress’ Best Idea to Save Local Journalism Would Actually Hurt It

“Democracy’s Library, a new project of the Internet Archive that launched last month, has begun collecting the world’s government publications into a single, permanent, searchable online repository, so that everyone—journalists, authors, academics, and interested citizens—will always be able to find, read, and use them”:

Archiving official documents as an act of radical journalism

The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s conservative clickbait outlet, has branched out into streaming and TikTok over the last few years. This NYT feature about “Culture War as Entertainment” sees Shapiro’s co-founder Mr. Boreing (I’m not joking) compare himself to Rupert Murdoch as he pursues a ‘conservative alternative to Hollywood’:

Can Nashville Be Hollywood for Conservatives?

Don’t forget to sign up at the mediareform.org.uk homepage for media news round

Thanks for reading. x

Love.Eliz

Hello,

It’s Sunday night. Which means you’re watching me struggle to produce a fortnightly newsletter alongside a full-time job, freelance work, and some semblance of social life in real time.

I love you for still being here x

Basically, football is on (and on, and on), Twitter’s still imploding slowly (and I have lots of new DMs from people who want to be my wife or give me a job), and the rich white guy called Bob that used to be the CEO of Disney is now CEO again, after the rich white guy called Bob that replaced him wasn’t very good at it.

Them’s the headlines. Here’s the rest.

It’s Sunday 27th Nov, 2022

Media News

• In the UK, public trust in journalism has doubled since 2000, and is at its highest since the annual Ipsos Veracity survey began in 1983. The survey also shows that journalists remain among the least trusted professionals in the country, however. (Press Gazette)

• Qatar has launched a review of its investments in London after Transport for London banned Qatari tourism advertisements in response to human rights concerns. (Reuters)

• The government has refused to pass a proposed change in the law to stop SLAPPs, lawsuits that allow the super-rich to exploit the law to intimidate and silence investigative journalists who wish to publish information about them. (The Guardian)

• A survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has found that 61% newsroom chiefs have embraced a shift to flexible and hybrid working, and around 20% were eager for staff to be back in the office full time. (RISJ)

• Australian Sky News presenter and Courier-Mail columnist Peter Gleeson has left News Corp after revelations of plagiarism. Digging by Australians for a Murdoch Royal Commission showed that almost half of one of his columns was unattributed reporting from a regional ABC journalist, and 62% of an article was copy lifted from a parliament factsheet. (The Guardian)

• An independent review has found that police acted with “unlawful interference” when they arrested four journalists covering a Just Stop Oil protest earlier this month. It’s been recommended that the officers in question complete training on interacting with the media. (Press Gazette)

• Reporters Without Borders is suing a French satellite operator who have continued to broadcast Russian TV channels. (Bloomberg)

• The watchdog Media Matters for America has published data showing that since the US midterms ended, Fox News has decreased its coverage of violent crime by 50%. (The Guardian)

• David Walliams’ future as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent is “up in the air” according to a show spokesman. Audio of disrespectful comments he made about contestants during a break in filming in 2020 were leaked a couple of weeks ago, followed by commentary across social media about other behaviour. Clips have surfaced of a stage show in which Walliams, in character, would invite teenage boys up from the audience and pull their clothes off. (BBC)

Campaigns + Content

HackedOff are campaigning for an investigation into claims the Daily Mail was involved in phone hacking. You can sign the petition here.

A journalist at Associated Press has been fired over a miscommunication on Slack that resulted in an incorrect story about the Ukrainian missile that landed in Poland. James LaPorta sent his editors a message saying that a source claiming the missile was from Russia had been vetted - which led to a chaotic chain of events that resulted in this being published less than 10 minutes later.

AP fired a reporter after a dangerous blunder. Slack messages reveal a chaotic process.

After being bought by Warner Bros Discovery, traditionally left-leaning news channel CNN is facing layoffs and a ‘neutralising’ of its political coverage. The US’ first 24-hour news channel is at a crossroads; is it going to choose a path that allows it to survive?

Layoffs, low ratings and a lurch closer to the right: is CNN in crisis?

Your one laugh for the week:

See you in a fortnight,

Love.Eliz

Hello.

As the meltdown of Twitter continues, Meta makes billions in losses and fires 13% of its workforce, and several other top-5 companies see stock prices crumbling, The Atlantic reckons The Age of Social Media is Ending.

I sort of hope they’re right, though I will miss Sterling Newton.

The launch of paid-for-verification on Twitter launched a “free-for-all of impersonation and misinformation” this week, as employees were fired or resigned, advertisers continued to pull out or pause their campaigns, and Elon announced that he was ending the company’s ‘work from home forever’ policy.

This culminated in a stock drop for Big Pharma’s Eli Lilly, when an impersonator who bought a blue check mark for the fake ‘Eli Lilly and Co’ account announced that insulin was ‘free now’.

While Elon harps on about “doing it for the lulz” (really), not everyone believes that it’s simply the cashgrab shit-show it appears to be.

Journalist Dave Troy makes an interesting case for a grand plan by Musk and Jack Dorsey, who has supported Musk’s takeover, for ‘Twitter as a public good’:

No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors”. They’re collaborating.

It’s Sunday 13 November, 2022

Media News

• Matt Hancock has decided to compete in the television game show I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! instead of doing the job taxpayers are paying him to do, and has been subsequently suspended as an MP before being slimed and feathered. So far, viewers have had to endure his asking fellow contestants for forgiveness for his conduct as Health Secretary during the pandemic, and bothering bugs and reptiles just trying to get on with their lives. (BBC/The Guardian)

• Amazon has become the first public company ever to lose $1 trillion in market value. The company’s market capitalisation fell to $879 billion from $1.88 trillion, while Microsoft was “close behind with $889 billion in value lost”. Inflation and monetary policies have triggered an industry-wide hit in growth felt by many of the US’ largest companies. (Bloomberg)

• Meta is firing 11,000 staff, a whopping 13% of its workforce. As it “invests heavily” in building mass-VR space ‘the Metaverse’, losses are expected to “grow significantly year-over-year” says CNBC; problems arose after “lukewarm guidance” for investors around last quarter’s losses, resulting in a massive stock drop. (CNBC)

• Disney has announced a hiring freeze and job cuts from its workforce of 190,000 after “disappointing” quarterly earnings, apparently a direct result of Disney+ suffering as part of this year’s industry-wide streaming subscriber drop-off. (CNBC)

• Three journalists were arrested covering a Just Stop Oil protest despite showing press cards. Law reform organisation Justice has warned this “might become commonplace” if the Public Order Bill passes into law. (Press Gazette)

• Oliver Darcy of CNN claims that ‘Murdoch favours DeSantis over Trump’ as the next Republican presidential nominee, after three top Murdoch-owned outlets (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post) all published favourable coverage of DeSantis. Murdoch papers have “significant sway “ over Republican voters, Darcy notes. (CNN)

• At 34, an “unprecedented number of women journalists are now detained in Iran”, says Reporters Without Borders. 42 journalists have been arrested during recent protests in the country over ‘morality police’ brutality. (RSF)

• Staff at HarperCollins, owned by Murdoch’s NewsCorp and one of the ‘Big Five’ publishing companies, have gone on strike until they reach an agreement on a new contract. (NYT)

Campaigns + Content

Anxiety, Ambivalence and Ambition: the three A’s, according to Project Inside Out, a set of clarifying tools for people struggling with how to take action on climate change.

Visit Project Inside Out if you’re interested in clarifying your own thoughts, feelings and direction on climate action.

“A generation of children has paid the price of an unregulated online world”, says childrens’ commissioner Rachel de Souza, in an opinion piece for the Observer, as it’s reported that Tories are considering ditching parts of the Online Safety Bill that address “legal but harmful” online speech, in the name of free speech. The controversial bill has been in development hell for a while now, and stands to be redeveloped yet again under new culture secretary Michelle Donelan:

UK government criticised for failing to protect children from online harm

Your One Laugh For the Week:

See you in a fortnight,

Love.Eliz

Hello.

These are shaping up to be fortnightly, because I’m tired and old and can’t handle a weekly newsletter and a full time job. Which is FINE. Alright?

Elon has dominated the news this week, pretending he’s totally happy to be buying Twitter after the law forced him to follow through on a dick swinging contest.

Allow editor of The Verge, Nilay Patel, to outline, hilariously, why Elon’s supposed ‘free speech’ mission is doomed:

Welcome to hell, Elon

It’s Sunday 30th Oct, 2022

Media News

• Elon Musk has finally moved in as the new owner of Twitter, under the supposed banner of returning ‘free speech’ to the site. He’s been met by plenty of criticism regarding the sites already strong free speech stance, not least because one of his first acts was to fire head of legal and policy Vijaya Gadde, the exec credited with creating and upholding the site’s free speech stance. (Among the maelstrom, actors managed to convince reporters they were recently fired employees by standing outside a Twitter building holding boxes). (TechDirt/The Verge)

• The Culture Committee has submitted a report to parliament accusing Nadine Dorries of lying to them when she claimed participants in a Channel 4 reality TV show were actors. The accusations may result in her being barred from the House of Lords. (The New Statesman)

• Rishi Sunak has hired Amber de Botton, ITV’s head of UK news, as his new communications chief. (The Guardian)

• Channel 4 is reportedly exploring becoming a non-profit trust as an alternative to privatisation. (Reuters)

• The wave of layoffs in US media companies continues, with 3,000 jobs cut so far this year by major companies such as Gannett, CNN, Netflix, Acast, Future, and Warner Bros. Discovery. A combination of reduced consumer spending on subscriptions, and inflation/supply chain issues slowing down the ad market, means cost cutting measures are rife. (Axios)

• The news site Semafor, recently launched by BuzzFeed founder and former NYT media columnist Ben Smith, has begun publishing its climate newsletter - and it’s sponsored by Chevron. (Gizmodo)

• A report by NewsGuard has revealed that Facebook has been running millions of dollars worth of ‘Pink Slime’ ads - partisan electoral ads that masquerade as articles from legitimate news sites. (Bloomberg)

• A Starbucks union has been ordered by a judge in the US to turn over all of its messages with journalists. The Washington Post calls the move “a sweeping and unusual ruling that will let the company peek into communications that courts usually view as private and protected.” (WaPo)

• In the second year of Tim Davie’s social media guidelines for BBC journalists, just one was formally disciplined. This is up from four in the first year. The guidelines instructed employees to remember their commitment to impartiality, not to ‘virtue signal’, or post criticism of colleagues. (Press Gazette)

• More than 250 literary figures have signed an open letter to Penguin Random House regarding its $2m book deal with Conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett contributed to the overturning of Roe v Wade after denying she would do in her confirmation hearing; signatories called on the publisher to recognise its “corporate responsibility commitments”. (The Guardian)

• The New York Post has fired an employee who hacked its website and Twitter account and published racist and sexist headlines. They included “Devine: We Must Murder Joe and Hunter Biden”; “Gov. Abbott: I Will Start Ordering Border Patrol to Start Slaughtering Illegals”; “Rufo: We Must Destroy and Imprison Union Teachers”. (Variety)

• A defamation suit brought by Stephen Elliott, founder of literary site The Rumpus, against writer and editor Moira Donegan, who created the infamous ‘Shitty Media Men’ spreadsheet which saw Elliot named by an unknown accuser as a sex pest, is coming to court. (NYMag)

• Though its audience remains the smallest of the major stations, GB News Radio, which launched in January this year, was the only major news radio station to see growth this year, according to Press Gazette. (Press Gazette)

• YouTuber MrBeast is launching a $150 million investment campaign to expand his entrepreneurial ventures, in areas such as merchandising and restaurants. He has valued his business at roughly $1.5 billion. (Axios)

Campaigns + Content

Natalie Bennett makes a great point. Consider donating to the Media Reform Coalition (MRC), who do great work on trying to pluralise and regulate the media (and whose blog I write too!)

Speaking of, The Wire has just published this interview with Tom Mills, the current MRC chair and author of The BBC: Myth of a Public Service:

As BBC Turns 100, Uncertainty Looms Large Over the Future of Britain's Public Broadcaster

No UK Prime Minister has won in decades without the support of the Sun - Blair’s infamous deal with Murdoch is the stuff of legend (for media nerds, at least). But as Labour takes a leap in the polls, will Starmer’s past count against him? 10 years ago, at the peak of the phone hacking scandal, Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions trying to send head of Murdoch’s News UK Rebekah Brooks to prison:

The Sun always backs the winner: can the Murdoch papers warm to Keir Starmer?

Your one laugh for the week:

That’s all folks.

Love.Eliz

Hello!

This summer was a great time for me to join the journalism industry proper:

Bron Maher at Press Gazette reports that journalist redundancies are “rising in the UK, US and Ireland as publishers brace for a recession.”

Over in Australia, PIJI’s latest Australian News Data Report holds a mirror to our situation, showing the news sector has “experienced the third largest market contraction within a single quarter since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic”.

“The sector’s volatility has extended well beyond the first closure of non-essential businesses in March 2020 […] the news industry remains vulnerable to external shocks” - in particular, the sharp rise in printing costs which has led to “at least 11 news mastheads across the country explicitly or implicitly closed due to price increases […] Many of these closed outlets were regional and remote.”

In other news, yes, I’m really enjoying my regional journalism job while it lasts, thanks.

It’s Saturday 15 Oct, 2022

Media News

• Just a week after the first phone hacking case against the Daily Mail was launched, another has arrived: against the Sun. Murdoch and his executives always claimed a ‘few bad apples’ defence, isolated within the now-shuttered News of the World, and denied use of illegality to obtain stories at its other British red-top. (The Guardian)

• A report by Meta has detailed a “months-long” Russian fake news campaign spread throughout Facebook and Twitter. Several stories mocked up as though originating from outlets such as the Guardian and Der Spiegel promoted doubt of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, and warning about natural gas shortages. These were “an extensive Russian influence operation to promote the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine that targeted people across the European Union and U.K.” [Image below] (Politico)

• Liz Truss held a car-crash press conference in which she announced the sacking of Kwarteng as Chancellor and a policy U-turn, answering only 4 questions from journalists before a swift exit. She left the room to demands for apology by journalists. Reports from both left- and right-leaning press were disdainful. (The Guardian)

• Just Stop Oil supporters threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ painting, hanging in the National Gallery, attracting a huge amount of attention to their cause. After glueing on to the wall beneath the soup-drenched frame, one of the young people asked: “What is worth more: art or life?”, anticipating the immediate outrage that followed. The painting was covered by a glass panel and was not damaged. The two young women have been charged with “causing criminal damage to the frame”. (BBC)

• The Wall Street Journal [a Murdoch-owned paper] reports that Murdoch is “exploring” the idea of re-merging parent corporations Fox Corp., which owns Fox News and a number of local TV stations and streaming service Tubi, and News Corp., under which sit his UK papers and publisher HarperCollins, after splitting them in 2013. (WSJ)

• Turkey has announced a new ‘disinformation’ law that will result in up to 3 years jail time for anyone found guilty of spreading “false information on the country’s security, public order or welfare” online. President Erdoğan has been widely criticised for cracking down on press freedom, with the country ranking among the worst in the world by press freedom monitors. (Bloomberg)

• After a year-long investigation, Google is facing an anti-trust lawsuit from the EU. The company’s ad business which, with sales of more than $100bn last year, accounts for 80% of company revenue has an “unfair advantage over rivals” due to its dominance over multiple facets of the online ad industry. If the lawsuit succeeds, it will be Google’s fourth billion-euro fine. (Reuters)

• Channel 4 has bought a number of artworks by “problematic” people such as Hitler, Picasso and Rolf Harris for “Jimmy Carr Destroys Art”, a televised debate about separating art from the artist. Director of programming Ian Katz says the show demonstrates Channel 4’s dedication to taking risks. (The Guardian)

• Alex Jones has been ordered to pay almost $1 billion to the families of Sandy Hook victims for a years-long hoax campaign that the tragedy was “faked” by parents. (Reuters)

• 1 in 3 children lie about their age to open social media accounts that let them access adult content, says new data from online/broadcast regulator Ofcom. (BBC)

• CNN has shut down its ‘Vault by CNN’ NFT project after just a year. Collectors who spent thousands of dollars of ‘minted collectibles’ have accused them of a “rug pull”. (The Verge)

• Ofcom is investigating GB News for a second time for its COVID vaccine coverage, after they broadcast an interview with author Naomi Wolf who claimed the vaccines are part of an effort to “to destroy British civil society”. (The Guardian)

• VICE has published portions from Kanye West’s interview with Tucker Carlson that had been removed by Fox News, in which he makes bizarre conspiratorial and anti-Semitic claims. West rants about “fake children” that had been placed in his house to “sexualise [his] kids”. West’s claim that he has been vaccinated, something Carlson has railed against on his show, was also edited out. (Motherboard)

• In a memo to employees, America’s largest news publisher Gannett has announced numerous austerity measures, such as cutting employer pension contributions and voluntary redundancy. (@BenMullin)

• Adnan Syed, whose mishandled murder conviction formed the basis of the first ‘blockbuster podcast’ Serial, has been released from prison after charges were unceremoniously dropped by Baltimore authorities on the basis of DNA evidence. (NBC)

• Graham Norton gave an interview at the Cheltenham Literature Festival this week in which he claimed that John Cleese and JK Rowling’s complaints, via their still-huge platforms, of being ‘canceled’ was use of the “wrong word […] the word should be ‘accountability’”. He noted also that being asked for his opinion on trans issues was inappropriate, questioning why the bulk of the public discourse did not include requests for comment from trans people themselves. (Yahoo)

Campaigns + Content

BREAKING: UK learns to read the news!

The government has recently closed a round of funding for media literacy campaigns in the UK, signaling that the country is taking the problem of disinformation - by trolls if not oligarchs and editors - more seriously. Media literacy also features in the government’s new (if problematic) Online Safety Bill.

This in-depth solutions feature by the BBC claims that Finland has found the key to fighting fake news:

“The Finnish school system is the cornerstone of the fight against fake news. Critical thinking and media literacy have been part of the curriculum for a very long time.”

US midterm elections: Does Finland have the answer to fake news?

Helen Pidd profiles the now-jailed online stalker and former BBC local DJ Alex Belfield, who harassed Jeremy Vine and other presenters for a decade. He leveraged the alt-right ecosystem, including collaboration with Katie Hopkins, to bolster his profile and carry out his disturbing harrassment campaigns:

‘I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it’: will jail silence Jeremy Vine’s stalker?

Numerous podcasters (including unionised staff from Parcast and Gimlet, as seen in last week’s newsletter) have complained about Spotify’s shelling-out of their shows. They claim the company is paywalling, refusing to market, and then dropping shows - citing low audience numbers. Podcast reporter Skye Pillsbury tracks the fall of Gimlet, one-time NYC darling, now ‘sidelined’ by its own parent company:

The Squeeze

An Oral History of Gimlet's Slow Demise

Read more

4 years ago · 11 likes · 5 comments · Skye Pillsbury

Your one laugh for the week:

See you next week.

Love.Eliz

Hello all.

Guardian columnist George Monbiot has accused the BBC of being ‘captured by right-wing thinktanks’ and “break[ing] its own rules to promote and normalise an extreme neoliberal cult”.

(WOW, George, tell us what you really think.)

To be fair, though, he’s not even exaggerating. Lobby groups funded by “tobacco firms, oil firms and foreign oligarchs” are platformed by the BBC “to comment on the performance of this government as if they are impartial observers, rather than the authors of its policies”.

To continue hopping astride the conspiracy bannister, he followed his column up with a tweet saying that, though he’s “sure this is just coincidence and means nothing”, on re-reading a Truss speech he was “struck by this weirdly redundant phrase”:

While delivering this speech, he says, she was wearing a dress “identical to the fascist leader's in [dystopian BBC drama] Years and Years”…

“I couldn't help feeling a slight shiver”.

I reckon this proves all conspiracy theories are 100% true.

Joking aside, that dress is amazing though. If I wanted to hint to people that I was a fascist, this is definitely how I would do it.

It’s Tuesday 11th October, 2022

Media News

• Ten years since Lord Justice Leveson published his report into the culture, practices and ethics of the press, the Daily Mail is, for the first time, being sued for phone hacking and other illegal activities. Associated Papers, parent company of the Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online, is being sued by Ex-Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes for phone hacking, and also by a group of high-profile people such as Prince Harry, Elton John and Doreen Lawrence, for bugging their homes and cars. (The Guardian/Press Gazette)

• Reach plc, the largest newspaper publisher in the UK, has revealed the financial impact of the advertising blackout following the Queen’s death. Their losses “more than offset” any uptick in sales following the news: while the Express and the Mirror saw 30% higher circulation of issues on September 9, this only translated to a 4.3% rise overall in September. Ad money was down 32.2% in total for September, compared to 17% in July and August. (Press Gazette)

• Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund which bought a huge number of US newspapers in recent years, has told editors of its almost 200 titles to “end the practice of endorsing major political candidates in their opinion pages”. They say they intend to prevent “culture wars” clashes, and push back against the conflation of opinion and news. (NYT)

• John Cleese, a long-time critic of both “cancel culture” and legacy media, is taking up a slot on right-leaning GB News. He says he wants to talk about “important information that gets censored”. (The Guardian)

• Following in the footsteps of Australia’s News Bargaining Code, the Canadian government has estimated Google and Facebook may end up paying $329 million a year to Canadian news publishers after the country passes its Online News Act. The sum could cover around 30% of Canadian newsrooms’ editorial costs. (Press Gazette)

• Birdwatch, Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking programme, will be made visible to all US users. The service used 15,000 fact-checkers in its pilot phase, who added notes on accuracy and context to tweets that don’t violate Twitter’s rules, but aren’t necessarily accurate. (@Birdwatch)

• Writers at left-wing news site The Canary say they have “overthrown” their management, claiming business malpractice and a ‘culture of narcissism’. They are now running the publisher as a co-operative, and say they have a £14,000 VAT debt left by the now-departed directors. (Press Gazette)

• The Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation in India was temporarily shut down and searched by tax inspectors last month, something the FT calls part of a ‘clampdown on free speech’ under Prime Minister Modi: “the searches were part of what liberal Indians decry as a clampdown on freedom of expression that, they say, has widened beyond media organisations and journalists to public intellectuals, think-tanks and comedians, too.” (FT)

• LadBible is sacking 10% of its staff following a slump in its share price which it says is due to inflation. Only 3 months ago, the company was discussing its expansion into the US market, and said its staff was growing 45% each year. (The Guardian/LadBible)

• The unions at Parcast and Gimlet claim to have been blindsided by Spotify, after the company fired a number of the production staff of each podcasting team. The company complained of low download numbers, but in a statement the union said that the company’s own decisions contributed to those stats. (@parcastunion)

• Around 80 operational staff at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have gone on strike in response to the company’s termination of their health care. Editorial staff have enacted a ‘byline blackout’ in support of their colleagues. The union claims that this is the last straw, after a number of “unfair labour practices”, 6 years without a contract, and 16 years without a pay rise. (Poynter)

• After becoming a non-profit newsroom at the beginning of the year, the Chicago Sun-Times has decided to drop its paywall and move to a digital membership model, saying it wants to be “truly open and inclusive” and accountable to readers. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Campaigns + Content

Public Interest News is a Necessity, Not a Luxury

Here are some independent local newsrooms who could do with your support:

The Burngreave Messenger, the UK’s only charity newspaper, did not receive vital funding this year after managing to survive on grants and donations for more than 20 years. “We now face the prospect of closure and we have a very short deadline to find alternative funding”, says the Messenger, based just outside of Sheffield. Drop them some cash if you can!

The Bristol Cable, is an award-winning, internationally-renowned pioneering newsroom (where I now work!), a members co-op that’s proven itself as a new model for local news. That said, you cannot eat prestige (who knew) and in order to earn a significant amount more than minimum wage, we are constantly working to find more members. Members vote on our operations, are part of our Bristol community, get free or discounted events access, and get an independent, investigative newspaper that truly represents them…no clickbait. Join today.

The Great Central Gazette is a new co-op newspaper for Leicester, which has just launched a crowdfunder. It is looking to replicate the Cable’s model, and what it has brought to Bristol’s media landscape. Donate to the crowdfunder if you can!

That’s all folks, see you next week.

Love.Eliz

Hi everyone,

The Bristol Cable, my new workplace, is hiring another journalist, a great role for someone who wants to work in an investigative community newsroom, rather than write 9 clickbait stories every day.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it, Gary Younge thinks you should apply:

The BBC has announced it plans to air “a series of “escapist and resilience advice shows” designed to help viewers through the “tough times ahead” caused by the cost of living crisis.

One of the headline programmes billed as an example of this is Wild Isles, a new Attenborough series about the UK that “features baby toads trying to escape giant leeches” in a Somerset “killing zone”, reminiscent of the ‘snakes vs iguanas’ scene from Planet Earth II.

I cannot tell whether or not this is meant to be funny.

Share

It’s Saturday Oct 1, 2022

Media News

• The inquest into Molly Russell’s death has illuminated the effects of social algorithms on children’s mental health, revealing Russell ended up in an online “vortex of despair”, regularly consuming a barrage of “bleak” material that encouraged self-harm and eventually led to her death. Representatives for Meta (who own Facebook and Instagram) were called to the hearing, as well as perhaps lesser-expected reps from Pinterest - which the inquest heard had delivered content recommendation emails with titles such as “10 depression pins you might like”. (The Guardian)

• Liz Truss embarked on a spate of local BBC radio interviews on Thursday morning, widely perceived as a move No.10 hoped would yield ‘softball’ questions. She faced, and struggled to answer, tough questioning from all local journalists involved. (The Bristol Cable)

• Several major companies (Dyson, Forbes, and others) have pulled their Twitter marketing campaigns after their ads appeared next to tweets soliciting child abuse material. One executive said "either Twitter is going to fix this, or we'll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads." (Reuters)

• In its pursuit of a digital-first model, and after cuts of £30 million were announced, the BBC will relocate a number of World Service journalists away from the UK and axe 382 jobs. (Deadline)

• The McCormick Foundation, the trust which distributes the endowment of former Chicago Tribune owner Robert McCormick, has announced it will invest $7.5 million in Chicago and Illinois-based nonprofit news organizations Block Club Chicago, Capitol News Illinois, Injustice Watch, and also Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism (named for his grandfather Joseph Medill). (McCormick Foundation)

• The Guardian has collected foreign press takes on the political and economic moment in Britain, describing it as a collection of “post-Brexit schadenfreude”. (The Guardian)

• Two former eBay security executives have been sent to prison for a harassment campaign carried out against a couple whose online newsletter, EcommerceBytes, was critical of the company. They sent threats and “disturbing home deliveries” such as cockroaches and a funeral wreath after then-CEO Devin Wenig suggested it was time to ‘take them down’. (Reuters)

• “Asia’s richest men” are enacting a hostile takeover of New Delhi Television Ltd., which will lead to them “dominating the sector” and hurting smaller media firms, says Bloomberg. (Bloomberg)

• KERA, a Texas public television station, is buying the Denton Record-Chronicle, a daily newspaper with the support of the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit “working to keep local news in local hands”. KERA says the purchase would “keep the Record-Chronicle locally owned and serving Denton County with local news and information connected to the community.” (Radio + TV Business Report)

• Bruce Willis has sold the commercial video rights to his likeness to Deepcake, an “AI-solutions” company delivering “celebrity and influencer branding”. The Telegraph reported that Willis is the first to do this, whereas ars Technica says they “could not verify that claim outside of the context of a first license with the firm Deepcake” and notes that “deepfakes have already been used in several Star Wars films and TV shows”. (ars Technica)

• The Financial Times is paying every member of its staff a one-off £1,800 payment to help with the cost of living. (Press Gazette)

Campaigns + Content

The Enough is Enough campaign continues, and has been touring the country. A rally with local speakers was held at St Georges in Bristol the other day, and today sees another rally next door to Temple Meads.

I’m excited to hear more about the campaign - I like their clear demands but I don’t know who we’re demanding this of, and what happens if they’re not met? General strike, anyone?

The website says the campaign “starts with holding rallies across Britain, forming community groups, organising picket line solidarity and taking action against the companies and individuals profiting from this crisis.”

I guess I’m eager to get to the taking action bit.

In an eerie report that demonstrates the difficulties emerging in the present and future of climate journalism, Poynter hears from on-the-ground reporters in Hurricane Ian’s climate-devastated path, where movement is all but impossible and radio towers are down.:

On the ground with local journalists reporting on Hurricane Ian 

That’s all for this week, folks.

Love.Eliz

Share

Hello.

It’s weeks like this when I truly lament the disappearance of the #BonkersBritain segment of the Noel Edmonds vehicle, Noel HQ.

Coverage of the Queen’s death has led to a blanket of fealty clickbait, consigning all other news to the depths of the pixels below your phone’s charging port.

If you thought Maitlis’ summary of government influence over the BBC was bad, Buckingham Palace have secured an industry-wide blackout on advertising. This takes place at great expense to the media, according to the Guardian:

“The death of the Queen and coverage of her funeral will top the ranks of the most-watched broadcasts in British television history, while newspaper publishers have seen an unprecedented boost in sales as mourners seek commemorative copies. And yet the biggest national event in decades will not provide a commercial bonanza for media firms.”

And it’s not just TV. Across all of British commerce, advertisement of products has been put on hold.

Upgrade to paid to read more

Power and Pop Culture

Mourning Has Broken on Normal Island (at Capitalism's Expense)

Coverage of the Queen’s death has led to a blanket of fealty clickbait, consigning all other news to the depths below your phone’s charging port. If you thought Maitlis’ summary of government influence over the BBC was bad, learn that Buckingham Palace, at huge expense to the industry…

Read more

4 years ago · Eliz Mizon

It’s Monday 19th Sept, 2022

Media News

• The European Union has revealed plans for new media freedom laws, and for the provision on “stable” funding for public interest media. The body claims it wants to combat state spying, political pressure on news outlets, and the placement of political adverts to protect independence across member states amid “mounting concern” about political influence on outlets across the continent. “No public media should be turned into a propaganda channel,” said the European Commission’s Vice President. (AP)

• Ex-BBC local DJ Alex Belfield has been sentenced to 5 years and 26 weeks imprisonment for serious stalking and harassment offences. He targeted other broadcasters including Jeremy Vine, who described an “avalanche of hate” for a period of years. (Sky News)

• Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia's few remaining independent news outlets, has been stripped of its last media licence. Editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov was a recent winner of Nobel Peace honours. He accused the Russian Supreme Court of “murder” and of depriving its 27 million readers of information. (Reuters)

• Twitter's shareholders have voted to go ahead with Elon Musk’s $44bn (£38bn) buyout proposal. (BBC)

• A small Dutch town has taken Twitter to court, demanding the platform delete messages relating to a conspiracy theory about it having been home to a Satanic paedophile ring. The original conspiracists are in jail on other online harassment charges and had previously been ordered to remove the content, but rumours still abound, leading to visits by conspiracists. (The Guardian)

• Union members of the New York Times and NBC News have refused to go into the office, in defiance of their employers’ plans. (WSJ)

• YouTube has claimed that a “small experiment” consisting of expanded “ad pods”—ad breaks of up to ten unskippable ads—has now “concluded.” (9to5 Google)

• Disney have released employee pay data based on race and gender for the first time. It shows just a fraction of a percent of difference between the pay rates of men and women, and between White people and people of colour when “base pay is adjusted for roles, experience and location”. (Bloomberg)

Campaigns + Content

Climate Tipping Points Warning Buried

Exactly half an hour after the death of the Queen was announced, The Guardian published an alarming report on a new scientific paper, showing we are now reaching the climate tipping points scientists have long warned us about.

Read and share: World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds

And another piece that isn’t getting enough attention: Governments urged to act after oil giants accused of misleading public

The brutal economics of celebrity culture is turning children into marketing mannequins by Van Badham

“Four-year-olds aren’t being clad in “mini-me” Olivier Rousteing outfits to get mud on them. They’re to get the eyeballs of media.

What’s being engineered by the brutal economics of current celebrity culture aren’t clans of Barrymores or Fondas sharing a traditional craft. It’s the aristocratisation of cultural power that often concentrates opportunities not around talent, but brand inheritance.”

Everybody Wants a Raise at the New York Times by Shawn McCreesh

“Right now, sign-ups are being passed to Guild members for “strike school,” in which staffers would learn how to build up to a strike and get skeptical colleagues onboard.”

Apropos of nothing, what a great time to revisit Propaganda (2012) the NZ-made, mind-and-genre-bending ‘documentary’/‘mockumentary’/‘propumentary’:

That’s all folks, see you next week.

Love.Eliz

Coverage of the Queen’s death has led to a blanket of fealty clickbait, consigning all other news to the depths below your phone’s charging port.

If you thought Maitlis’ summary of government influence over the BBC was bad, learn that Buckingham Palace, at huge expense to the industry according to the Guardian, has arranged an industry-wide blackout on advertising following the passing of the Queen:

“The death of the Queen and coverage of her funeral will top the ranks of the most-watched broadcasts in British television history, while newspaper publishers have seen an unprecedented boost in sales as mourners seek commemorative copies. And yet the biggest national event in decades will not provide a commercial bonanza for media firms.”

It’s not just television. Across all of British commerce, advertisement of products has been put on hold.

Share

Read more

Hello,

Very much overshadowed by other news, the 21st anniversary of 9/11 is today.

Last year, I pulled together a bunch of research and interviews around the extensive video footage captured on that day, and the media and conspiracy narratives that followed.

I’m proud of it, so I’m sharing it here again:

Power and Pop Culture

A People’s History of 9/11

Content warning: upsetting descriptions and data throughout. I’ve been wondering if I’m desensitised to the events of 9/11. Each impact and collapse, sirens screaming past crying onlookers; even the ubiquitous distress whistles - the sound of downed firefighters - do not disturb me as much as I think they should…

Read more

5 years ago · 2 likes · Eliz Mizon

Oh and, also overshadowed by other news, we’re all about to enter a new era of pain, unless we, you know, demand that something change:

It’s Sunday September 11th, 2022

Media News

• Liz Truss is reportedly planning to “dilute” the incoming Online Safety Bill. Free speech concerns had been expressed from both left and right over wording in the bill saying speech that was “legal but harmful” must be addressed. Truss says “tweaks” are needed to protect free speech. (FT)

• Michelle Donelan has been appointed Culture Secretary after Nadine Dorries resigned last week. Donelan has worked in television, including in marketing for Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment. PACT has sent an open letter to the Prime Minister in Dorries’ wake, asking her to halt the privatisation of Channel 4. (Variety)

• The second Reach strike, a three-day walkout planned for Sep 13-15, has been postponed in light of Queen Elizabeth’s passing. In addition, a new pay offer has been made by the company to the union, and workers will vote on it next week. (Hold the Front Page)

• Emily Maitlis has been highly praised, and also come under fire, for her 2022 MacTaggart lecture in which she criticised governmental influence within the BBC. She questioned the broadcaster’s apology to the government for her criticism of Dominic Cummings, and the appointment of “agent of the Conservative party” Robbie Gibb to the board. She vocalised her fears for democracy due to corporate press interference. (The Guardian)

• Robert Telles, a government official in Las Vegas, has been arrested for the murder of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German. German had previously reported on “turmoil” in the public office that Telles oversaw. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)

• Conservative politicians in the US have been distributing campaign adverts styled as newspapers to groups of registered voters, tailored to their community. One in Chicago is ‘titled’ the “Chicago City Wire”; one in DuPage County called the “DuPage Policy Journal” showed “two full pages of photos of men – mostly Black and Latino” whom the publication says will be released from prison because of Democratic legislation. (NBC Chicago)

• California’s new budget has promised $25 million for local news fellowships. The funding will be distributed via UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2023. (Nieman Lab)

• After its recent securing of $42 million in residuals from Netflix, the Writers Guild of America has done the same for its members with payments owed by Amazon. A settlement of $4 million has been agreed for 37 writers, from 31 films on Prime. WGA West said Amazon has “been systematically undervaluing imputed license fees”. (Deadline)

• The Saudi and Gulf Co-operation Council, a media watchdog for Middle Eastern states, has demanded that Netflix remove all content deemed to violate "Islamic and societal values and principles". Details on violating content haven’t been given, but it’s assumed that LGBT representation is a primary target. (BBC)

• Ralph Nader has launched a Washington D.C.-based print newspaper, the Capitol Hill Citizen, setting out to address the “scoop-obsessed” Washington press and the “gulag of clutter, diversion, ads, intrusions and excess abundance” of online news. “The paper’s coverage centers on the issues that Nader had devoted his career to exposing[…]: the growth of corporate influence on Capitol Hill, the steady erosion of congressional power, the perennial corruption of U.S. lawmakers and, of course, the follies and failures of the mainstream political media.” (Politico)

• Workers at Conde Nast publications that don’t have their own individual unions (e.g. The New Yorker, Pitchfork) have won voluntary recognition from the company for their publisher-wide union:

Campaigns + Content

SIGN UP: to Independent Media Outlets

If you live in a British city, chances are that you have a local, independent news outlet. If you don’t, there are national and international news teams that are doing fantastic work, rebuilding a trustworthy news culture, that could do with your ongoing support.

30 minutes after the news of the Queen’s passing broke, it was reported that we are on the brink of hitting several key climate tipping points.

The ongoing minimisation of crucial news under sensational clickbait needs to stop. We can only stop this juggernaut by focusing on building alternatives.

If you’re one of my Bristol-based followers, join the Cable, the newspaper I now work with. Supporting us monthly will help us become sustainable.

There are other city outlets such as The Manchester Mill and Leicester’s Great Central Gazette, but also national and international investigative teams such as The Ferret in Scotland, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London.

READ: The Race Class Narrative Report

A new report by CLASS shows how progressive narratives are utterly failing to compete with the hard-right’s “anti-woke” narrative. The report gives an analysis of the hard-right strategy and how it works, and offers two alternative, progressive narratives for inclusion that outperform the ‘anti-woke’ narrative in research testing.

Ellie Mae O’Hagan, the head of CLASS until recently, says that the anti-woke narrative is so strong and coherent that of 500 progressive sources tested, the research team did not find one that delivered a narrative that outperformed the current right-wing strategy. “We found Liz Truss is a key messenger” for anti-woke narratives, she added.

READ: Mic Wright’s blog is always a fun read, but particularly cutting this week as he takes on the blanket fealty clickbait response to the Queen’s death:

Conquest of the Useless

Mourning sickness

I am loth to interrupt the rapture of mourning in which the nation is now enjoying its favourite festival — a funeral. But in a country like ours, a total suspension of common sense and sincere human feeling for a whole fortnight is an impossibility…

Read more

4 years ago · 15 likes · 2 comments · Mic Wright

That’s all folks. See you next week.

Love.Eliz

In response to not only the current cost-of-living crisis, but their ongoing decades-long cost-of-living crisis, journalists of the NUJ went on strike this week.

Several further strike days are planned later this month, and outside of strike days journalists will ‘work to rule’—that is, refuse any overtime or work outside their job description—until a deal is made.

Journalists’ salaries have more than stagnated - they have, at best, remained unchanged in ten years, and in some cases reduced, according to Bristol NUJ treasurer Paul Breeden. He adds that “overworked and underappreciated” journalists “work hours and hours beyond the time that they’re supposed to” due to punishing workloads:

“Journalism is a profession that attracts people who are very dedicated. And that makes them less likely to make a fuss, and more likely to make them put up with unfair pay and conditions. But in the current economic circumstances, what they’re being offered isn’t even enough to pay rent.

There’s an irony that in Bristol, where rents are really high and it’s expensive to live, journalists are being asked to write stories about how they can’t afford to pay their rent, and have a decent life.”

Regular readers will remember my coverage of this earlier in the year - Reach being perhaps the worst offender simply due to its status as the wealthiest news publisher in the country:

Power and Pop Culture

"Media Elite"?: The Poverty Wages of UK Journalism

Members of the Rail Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) Union are on strike for three days this week to demand a payrise in line with inflation and the rising cost of living. Just a little bit of journalistic digging will reveal that, despite what the…

Read more

4 years ago · 4 likes · Eliz Mizon

Read more

Hello - this week, I’ve been mostly… working at my local newspaper, The Bristol Cable!

I’m excited to be there, to learn the ropes in a new job for the first time in years, and to deliver local news in an ethical, sustainable, in-depth way.

What it does mean, however, is that freelance work is going to take a backseat, at least while I settle in.

I plan to keep The Chompsky Weekly media news roundup each week, but I expect articles/analysis to be few and far between, if at all. We’ll just have to see what happens, and how much time/mental space I end up with.

Thank you so much for continuing to support the newsletter, I hope you find it useful and interesting. If you have any feedback, this interim period would be a good time for me to reflect.

Please take a short moment to comment below on why you subscribe to Power and Pop Culture, and what you’d like to see change, and stay the same, as I take it forward.

Thanks everyone,

Eliz (Writer and Comms Lead, The Bristol Cable)

It’s Sunday 21st Aug, 2022

Media News

• A group of journalists and lawyers have sued the CIA over allegations the agency spied on them when they visited Julian Assange at Ecuador's embassy in London. (Reuters)

• While maintaining criticism of its existing problems, Poynter has collected stories outlining the positive effects of Australia’s News Bargaining Code, the law that requires Google and Facebook to pay newsrooms for the traffic that their links bring the platforms. The report says that the Code delivered around AUD$200m (£116m) to newsrooms in its first year. (Poynter)

• Mexico’s hostile environment for journalists continues. Already in 2022, 18 journalists have been killed (13 and 14 were recorded in total for 2021 and 2020, respectively). A human rights organisation has said this year could be “the worst year in a century” for journalists’ safety. (Reuters)

• Plans to collapse the BBC’s domestic and global rolling news channel into one ad-funded ‘BBC News’ channel broadcast from Washington DC has been criticised by the NUJ and top BBC presenters. Martine Croxall has urged license fee payers, who would still be able to access the channel for free, to protest the plans. (iNews)

• Though Netflix plans to introduce adverts to maintain its financial dominance, it’s reported that the streamer will not place ads in kids shows and movies. (Bloomberg)

• A short time after the launch of both its flagship streaming services, Warner Bros. Discovery is to merge Discovery+ and HBOMax, losing a number of lower-profile items of content but saving $3bn in the process. (Engadget)

• Reliable Sources, CNN’s influential liberal news show fronted by Brian Stelter, has been cancelled. Vanity Fair’s media reporter Joe Pompeo has chronicled the rumours that its lib-lean was out of step with the politics of the company executives, which they’ve denied. (Vanity Fair)

• Publishing giants Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House are seeking to merge, something which the US Justice Department is trying to block. Their main argument is that it will make a huge dent in author royalties. (Bloomberg)

• Award-winning journalist Saeed Taji Farouky was arrested and his devices confiscated at a Free Palestine rally by UK police, something he says has not happened before in 18 years of global conflict reporting. (@saeedtaji)

• The New York Daily News Union has spoken out against the hedge fund that recently bought it, Alden Global Capital, saying it’s created unsustainable work conditions and driven an exodus of journalists:

Campaigns + Content

SUPPORT XR’s MEDIA CAMPAIGNERS

If you needed any more reason, check this out:

What happens when an oil company ‘benevolently’ steps in to serve a news desert? Molly Taft of Gizmodo went to find out:

Chevron Jumps Into Texas' News Desert With Stories About Puppies, Football, and Oil

And another chronicle of the ways in which local news is suffering at the hands of big business:

“How a Soviet-born developer and a West Virginia billionaire destroyed a 141-year-old Colorado newspaper”

End Times in Aspen: How to Kill a Newspaper

In the face of tightening belts and increasing competition, the streaming market has become the monster it purported to replace, says Axios media reporter Sara Fischer:

“The streaming era was supposed to give consumers more choice, but streaming options increasingly resemble the bloated cable bundles they sought to replace.”

The TV Bundle is back

This is cute, please enjoy it:

That’s all folks.

Love.Eliz

Hello everyone,

It’s been a bumper week. I’m currently on hiatus before I begin a new job so, of course, I’ve filled my spare time with work.

This week, I had my first commission from Byline Times:

Behind the scenes of British media’s climate denial

And I managed to publish a couple of pieces for Power and Pop Culture too:

Power and Pop Culture

Explained: Have UK teens replaced news channels with Instagram?

On July 21, the UK’s broadcast regulator Ofcom published the following headline from the results of their 2022 News Consumption Survey: Instagram, TikTok and YouTube teenagers’ top three news sources Teenagers in the UK are turning away from traditional news channels and are instead looking to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to keep up to date, Ofcom has found…

Read more

4 years ago · 2 likes · Eliz Mizon

Power and Pop Culture

REVIEW: Hothouse Earth - the climate action guide you've been waiting for

If there’s one criticism I have about Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide, it’s that it’s kinda scary. But let’s be fair—this is not his fault, it’s just the nature of the contents. There’s really no way to be honest about the climate crisis without creating a little fear…

Read more

4 years ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Eliz Mizon

Oh, and FYI, all those stans uncritically supporting Johnny Depp crowdfunded to get further documents unsealed—much of which was horribly condemning of him, AND his best mate Marylin Manson, who is about to launch a defamation case of his own in the face of overwhelming evidence he’s a deeply troubled, violent bastard (CW lower down the thread, disturbing evidence from Manson’s relationship with Wood):

It’s Friday Aug 5th, 2022

Media News

• As a result of negotiation with Netflix, the US Writers Guild has won $42 million in unpaid residuals for its members. 216 writers for 139 Netflix films will receive payments, as a result of a case brough by Eric Heisserer, who was owed $850k (plus $350k in interest) for his screenplay for Bird Box. (The Hollywood Reporter)

• Journalists at the Mirror will vote on whether to strike this week after rejecting a 3% pay rise offer from management in response to the cost of living crisis. Reach plc bosses Jim Mullen and Simon Fuller received pay packets of £4m and £3m last year, respectively. Union members are calling on them to give up part of their salary to pay staff wages, a move made by the FT’s editor earlier in the pandemic. (Hold the Front Page)

• A new Pew survey shows that 1 in 6 journalists are part of a union, and 41% said they’d join one if the option were available. (Pew Research Center)

• Despite the news that parent company Thompson Reuters expects revenue to increase by 6% this year, journalists at Reuters have been offered only a 1% pay rise, and have announced a strike for the first time in 30 years. Union members also claim that management are stalling on negotiations, after 15 suggested dates were turned down. (Reuters/Poynter)

• Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been ordered to pay two parents of a school shooting victim $4m in damages. (CNN)

• Observer columnist Nick Cohen has been accused by multiple women of sexual harrassment and assault. His column is paused pending investigation. Journalist and presenter Lucy Siegle, the only one of the women to waive anonymity, asks in an essay If The Guardian can behave like this, how much impact has #MeToo really had? (Press Gazette/The New European)

• Labor Notes journalist Jonah Furman has accused the popular NYT podcast The Daily of promoting anti-worker “propaganda” in an episode that claimed “asking for a raise is bad because it makes inflation worse. Taking a second job is good because it makes inflation better” and did not mention “corporate profiteering”. (@JonahFurman)

• The French government has agreed to scrap their public television licence fee to help taxpayers with the cost of living. (The Guardian)

• Following allegations of sexual misconduct and bullying by Tim Westwood during his time at BBC Radio, a barrister has been appointed to examine what the BBC knew about concerns regarding his conduct. (BBC)

Campaigns + Content

As a companion piece to the Mirror vote news, here is a piece by a local historian in Cambridge about the difference between his local paper when he used to deliver it as a teenager, and how it now operates under Reach’s ownership:

Reach PLC is damaging a historic newspaper brand – and it doesn’t need to

VFX workers in Hollywood have spoken to media outlet Defector about the ever-more crushing, deadline-cramming work of digitally altering blockbusters:

Inside Hollywood’s visual effects crisis

The RMT’s press officer John Millington has written a piece for The Journalist about the decision to put Mick Lynch in front of the cameras in a weeks-long media blitz:

Upfront approach wins over rail strike critics

Finally, Mick Lynch has plenty to say on how the media barons responded to articulate workers making their voices heard:

See you next week,

Love.Eliz

If there’s one criticism I have about Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide, it’s that it’s kinda scary. But let’s be fair—this is not his fault, it’s just the nature of the contents. There’s really no way to be honest about the climate crisis without creating a little fear.

That said, given that the final ‘solutions’ section of the book is so powerful, I do wish he’d have got to it a little sooner rather than spending quite so long informing me of all his well-researched, authoritatively delivered, yet easy-to-understand scientific detail.

McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, refuses to mollycoddle us, but also to leave us without hope. Best of all, he is more than clear that hope is dependent on the majority, instead of the minority, taking their heads out of the sand and demanding change at government level.

This, I’d argue, is what makes the An Inhabitant’s Guide so powerful. It gives us an outline of ‘what to do now’, making clear that the vast majority requires system change at the very top, and demonstrates the kind of world we can expect to live (or not) in if we don’t.

He ends the book by saying:

“I am certainly raising the alarm, and I don’t apologise for this. But alarmist? No. There is no exaggeration of the dangers here, no hyperbole. All the material included and addressed in this book is rooted in hard science…

Raising the alarm, in our current circumstances, is a good thing. It fits with the precautionary principle and also with the idea that we need to really know our enemy - in this case global heating - and how well it is armed, if we want to defeat it. My view is that, currently, most members of the public, and indeed most world leaders, simply do not. The fact that the word ‘cake’ was mentioned ten times more than ‘climate change’ on UK television in 2020 says it all about how true appreciation of the nature and scale of the climate emergency has yet to break through.”

I recently wrote about climate denial in the media; from many outlets, coverage is at best infrequent, and at worst a scene from Idiocracy. When outlets such as the Guardian and the Independent do make a commitment to covering the crisis with urgency, the tone and reactive fragmentation of the coverage—which is, essentially, just the way that news works—conjures such anxiety that many are now simply avoiding it. I have argued that the current business model of news is not equipped to deliver the message needed. McGuire comes pretty damn close.

To his credit, while the book is a frightening outline of the potential scenarios for our increasingly heating planet, McGuire is honest about where the science is clear, where it is not, and what can be done to prevent the worst (more on this, below).

He is also, as he says above, not a gleeful alarmist. He called out the Guardian on Twitter this week for the headline on their coverage of the book’s release, noting that he didn’t at any point use the phrase “total climate meltdown”. They have now changed it.

As well as being a volcanologist (it’s literally this guy’s job to understand what happens when a bunch of shit is chucked into the atmosphere) McGuire is a good writer. Not in the ‘he knows lots of big words’ way; in the ‘this is a plain-English, reliable outline I can understand but doesn’t talk down to me’ way. Let’s face it - that’s what millions of us, billions of us, need right now.

It’s not possible to create a full summary here—the book is far-reaching, examining all sorts of global causes and effects, possible and probable, in a fair amount of scientific detail.

But here’s a breakdown of key learnings I took away:

• An average temperature rise of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is the “guardrail” above which climate breakdown becomes harshly experienced around the world, and tipping points/warming feedback loops begin to trigger each other, or “cascade”.

• Given this is an average rise of 1.5°C, in some places (e.g. the sea) temperatures will be less; on land (i.e. where you live) they could be, say, 7°C hotter. (Your current summers are 33°C? Imagine frequent 40°C. And that’s one of the better-case scenarios.)

• To keep to 1.5°C, we need to cut emissions by 45% before 2030. Currently, we are on track to increase emissions by 14% by then, which would lead to 2.7°C by 2050.

• We’ve already hit 1.2°C. If all post-COP pledges are kept we might keep to 1.9°C. But these are only pledges, not legally binding. We are not currently meeting them.

• Regardless of actual temperature changes in each place, weather will become more extreme generally. More floods. More heatwaves. More storms, that last longer, and cause more damage.

• The science is settled. The planet is heating up, and as a result weather patterns are changing and becoming more extreme. And yet: “there are still so many unknowns associated with global heating that the [modeling] can only provide a guide to what our world will look like”.

• We will have to adapt to some change, no matter what, but currently, easy adaptations are not being implemented by governments. For example, in the UK insulation is badly needed in millions of homes, not only to keep heat in during winter, but heat out during summer. “Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated UK homes will become unliveable heat traps […] hundreds of thousands of these inappropriate homes continue to be built every year.”

• Wildfires are an example of the kinds of positive feedback loops that are both a cause, and effect, of warming: firstly, “due to the destruction of huge areas of forest that would otherwise have absorbed a significant amount of carbon during its lifetime. The second because the burning of wood on such a prodigious scale releases colossal amounts of CO2”.

• “For the whole of 2021, wildfires released around the same amount of CO2 as Germany emits in a year.”

• “Drought may not be spectacular” but is “regarded by cultural historians as one of the most important drivers of political change in the past 5,000 years […] four-fifths of all the world’s cultivated land [is] dependent upon regular rainfall”

• All of this results in a prediction that the number of global climate migrants (who, at least currently, are not protected under the legal term ‘refugee’) will go “through the roof”. Mass migration has, as we’ve seen, tended to lead to a rise of populism, fascism, and civil unrest when poorly dealt with by government.

I’ll stop now, because I’ve covered a lot (though this barely scratches the surface).

I also think it’s important to get to the ‘solutions’ bit, where McGuire really delivers. A whole section at the end of the book is dedicated to the specific actions we need to take, and McGuire does not pull punches: system change is paramount.

“Our climate is being destroyed by unadulterated, free-market capitalism […] Within a political-economic system predicated upon competition and profit rather than the greater good, it is always going to be challenging and problematical - even with the best will in the world - to bring down emissions rapidly enough to avoid the most severe impacts of global heating.”

Here are the solutions he outlines in the final section of the book:

Government/industry

• “Fossil fuel companies, responsible for leaking around half of all methane emitted by human activities, need to be made - by law - to clean up their act immediately.”

• “wellheads and coal mines shut down as soon as possible […] leave known oil, gas and coal reserves in the ground, and stop exploring”

• “punitive measures, starting with the scrap of subsidies […] or better still, the subsidies should be switched to the renewables sector.”

• “banks must be made, using bouquets, brickbats or both, to stop hurling money at the fossil fuel sector”

• “accelerate divestment of any and all stocks and shares [in fossil fuels]”

• “insurers need to play their part by backing away from providing a safety net for fossil fuel facilities”

• “throw in a carbon tax”

• “large-scale tree planting”

• “progressive phasing out of beef and dairy farming”

• “restoring peatlands and wetlands so they store more carbon”

• “launching massive investment programmes in home insulation and green domestic energy in developed countries”

• “the ramping up of cheap, green and efficient public transport systems”

• “the incentivisation of walking and cycling”

• “shovelling money in the direction of majority world countries to help them transition to greener futures with as little economic and social upheaval as possible”

• “take away what seems to be a free pass to pollute from the richest 1 per cent”

Read more

On July 21, the UK’s broadcast regulator Ofcom published the following headline from the results of their 2022 News Consumption Survey:

Instagram, TikTok and YouTube teenagers’ top three news sources

Teenagers in the UK are turning away from traditional news channels and are instead looking to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to keep up to date, Ofcom has found.

The article claims that the BBC, long the UK’s most trusted news source, has this year been knocked off the top spot in the 12-15 age bracket, to fifth place.

Panic about the public getting their news from social media is not new, but recent revelations about social media’s impact on childrens’ mental health, in particular the headlines about the effects of Instagram’s algorithm on young people, make this latest story particularly hard-hitting.

The issue with this headline—as with so many headlines—is that it obscures the specific mechanisms behind the phrase ‘from social media’.

‘News from social media’ could be the link Brenda just posted to her latest flat Earth research. But it could also mean you regularly visit the Financial Times’ Twitter account.

Steve Barnett, a Professor of Communications at the University of Westminster, called Ofcom’s headline “clickbait”, representing a “misinterpretation of its own data”.

In response to the reproduction of the headline by outlets such as Press Gazette, Tortoise, and Power and Pop Culture, Professor Barnett reached out to say that the headline was “creating a misleading impression of young people’s news consumption habits”.

“This matters.” Prof. Barnett tweeted, “[Ofcom’s] headlines set the tone for parliamentary reports and debates. It’s irresponsible. Someone at @Ofcom needs to get a grip on how vital research data are presented.”

The specific data can be found (with difficulty) on Ofcom’s website in the Teens News Consumption Survey data table: line 5259 shows a net figure of 39% for the BBC.

What this means is that when you put together all teens’ news consumption data—the BBC news articles teens are consuming from its website directly, and via BBC social media accounts on Instagram, YouTube etc.—the broadcaster remains teens’ most frequent source of news overall.

Read more

Hello all,

This week I have been mostly: trying to find journalist-whistleblowers.

Please feel free to retweet the above, rip the photo from the tweet and share that, or share the following plain text:

Have you been pressured into writing/editing something you felt was wrong?

I'm writing a piece about climate denial/delayism in media coverage (and working on a wider series about journalists in the UK and control over their own work).

If you've been pressured to write, contribute to, or edit stories on climate that you felt were incorrect or in any way misleading, please get in touch.

You can reach me on Twitter by DM @elizmizon

It’s Sunday 24th July, 2022

Media News

• The Scottish chapter of Youth Strike for Climate has written an open letter to the UK media demanding three changes to coverage of heatwaves: 1) All coverage of heatwaves must feature and be led by climate scientists; 2) All coverage of heatwaves must name the climate crisis and communicate its severity; 3) Coverage of heatwaves must not use “fun in the sun” imagery. (Medium)

• A majority of Big Tech companies (Meta, TikTok, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix and Spotify) have signed up to Indonesia’s new draconian publishing licences. Digital laws in the country mean authorities can censor platforms; in order to retain access to the region, the fourth largest population in the world, the companies have agreed. (FT)

• Fox News and MSNBC, two of the States’ leading conservative and liberal broadcasters respectively, have been downgraded by credibility auditor Newsguard, which says they each “fail to adhere to basic journalistic standards”. (Press Gazette)

• Full Fact, the London-based fact-checking charity, is developing a tool to fact-check claims in real-time, meaning facts could “flash in chyrons [on-screen graphics] under the faces of politicians and pundits debating on TV”. (Poynter)

• Erin Overbey, the New Yorker’s archive editor, has written a frank and meticulous Twitter thread about inequality in legacy media, in which she claims Editor-in-Chief David Remnick added mistakes into her copy when she was already on probationary watch for speaking up about inequality.

• The head and deputy head of Goldsmith’s media department have been suspended after they wrote to students about the results of ongoing strike action by academics. (openDemocracy)

• The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee has rejected the idea a paywall could fund the BBC, but is reported to be considering a council tax levy in the event that the Tories’ are able to enact their plan to scrap the license fee in 2027. (The Guardian)

• Netflix is being sued for breach of labour laws by a contestant of ‘Love Is Blind’. Jeremy Hartwell alleges that “producers encouraged the cast to drink alcohol, while limiting access to food and water and underpaying them.” (BBC)

• After years of claiming it was committed to promoting and funding the new industry as a response to accusations that Big Tech has been siphoning news’ economic model, Facebook has announced it will be “reallocating resources” from Facebook News and its newsletter platform Bulletin, to focus on the creator economy. (WSJ)

• Justice secretary Dominic Raab has announced courts will get new powers to dismiss Slapp cases (strategic lawsuits against public participation, a type of lawsuit that the wealthy can use to kill critical stories) against reporters. (The Guardian)

• In their latest news consumption report, Ofcom has claimed that for the first time social media is the most popular news source among UK teenagers, bumping the previous source, the BBC, off the top spot. However, their presentation of the data obscures the fact that the BBC's social media platforms are popular with teens. Professor Steve Barnett of the University of Westminster claims that when you take into account BBC social accounts they remain the top news source for all demographics. (Variety/Steve Barnett on Twitter)

• The Guardian has given its editor-in-chief Katherine Viner a £150k (42%) pay rise, even after it only recently raised freelancer pay 5% for the first time in over a decade, and published coverage about ‘profiteering bosses’. (The Telegraph)

• Tech workers at The Atlantic will follow their editorial colleagues in forming a union. (HuffPost)

• Both Tory leadership candidates are believed to back plans to privatise Channel 4, spelling bad news for the 96% of the public who reject the sale of the broadcaster. Rishi Sunak has publicly spoken of his support for the plans and, although she hasn’t spoken on the issue publicly, Liz Truss is reported to support them also. (The Guardian)

• Channel 4 has published new guidelines, developed with disabled talent such as comedian Adam Hills, for the representation of disability and people with disabilities in broadcasting. (Channel 4)

• The BBC has celebrated its centenary by releasing over 30k items from its archive online. The material is categorised by region and can be downloaded and used non-commercially. (BBC)

Campaigns + Content

Sign the open letter to demand the reinstatement of Des Freedman and Gholam Khiabany, the head and deputy head of Goldsmiths media dept, who have been suspended after writing an email to students about how the ongoing strike action could affect their graduation.

Shirish Kulkarni of the Bureau for Investigative Journalism has published his research findings on how presenting news in a modular format may help engagement:

Why the future of journalism is modular

In the Washington Post, journalist Amanda Ripley asks how, if even news creators are avoiding the news to prevent overwhelm, we might solve that for ourselves and our audiences:

“I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or the product?”

Five internet culture journalists tell the Columbia Journalism Review about their jobs in “Very Online”

The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner has published an interview with Alan Dershowitz in which he subtly takes him down, and explicitly fact-checks his claims that he has been ‘cancelled’. It’s a pretty brilliant read:

The Present Age

Isaac Chotiner's Alan Dershowitz Q&A is the blueprint for "cancel culture" coverage

There’s a joke among people who are really plugged into media Twitter: if Isaac Chotiner calls to ask if he can interview you, run. On Tuesday, the New Yorker Q&A writer released an interview with Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and in the process, he demonstrated why that remains solid advice…

Read more

4 years ago · 58 likes · 3 comments · Parker Molloy

In case you need a pick me up:

That’s all for this week, folks.

Love.Eliz

Members of Extinction Rebellion were arrested this week for cracking the front windows of News UK’s London HQ. They were protesting the publisher’s coverage of climate chaos in Europe, which in many cases has downplayed or denied the climate emergency.

They also sprayed “TELL THE TRUTH” and “40 DEGREES = DEATH” in chalk paint, and pasted pages of the Sun showing climate-denying/omitting headlines onto adjoining walls.

“Special care was taken to ensure no one was hurt when the windows were cracked”, XR’s press release noted.

Among the XR members at the scene was former Sun and Daily Mail journalist Steve Tooze, who shared insider knowledge of corporate media’s approach to the climate crisis:

“These newspapers have spent 30 life-or-death years denying or ignoring the climate crisis to ensure that Business As Usual keeps the money flowing into their already obscenely-bloated bank accounts. As a result, millions of us still have no clue about the terrifying dangers that threaten us. 

“Newspapers that treat a deadly heat wave as an invitation to a fun day on the beach and use it to advance their puerile and divisive culture war nonsense are not newspapers at all. They are propaganda sheets for two very rich and evil men. We are no longer prepared to sit at home feeling angry and despairing at the lies and disinformation.”

Tooze and others, including scientists, doctors and media activists, spoke to RealMedia about the action:

Read more

Hi everyone.

I’ve been on a working holiday for a few weeks, which has been lovely, but I’m back, baby, and I’m ✨rebranding✨!

(I got sick of explaining that yes, I do know how to spell Chomsky. How can I expect people to take me seriously as ✨An Influencer✨ if they think I can’t spell good?)

‘The Chompsky Weekly’ will remain as the ‘bitesize’ news roundup at the end of the week (surely that pun is clear?) but the publication as a whole will be titled Power and Pop Culture. From…now!

Are the media doing their job on climate?

So, I’ve been pissed for ages about how ‘the media’ isn’t doing a good enough job informing people of the impending climate crisis (which isn’t impending; it was impending in, like, 1979. It’s happening, right now.)

But, then, the centre/left leaners have been covering it, haven’t they? Let’s just take a single example, this article from 2018: Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040. It seems like it couldn’t really be clearer…

But then, I suppose, 2040 still feels pretty far away unless you have embedded yourself in Climate Twitter (or, I suppose, other things like… you’re a NASA scientist or something) and get that the hurricanes coming our way in ‘40 will be a result of the emissions belched today.

There are a fair few impressions for the above tweet by the piece’s writer, but not as many as you might expect on a story about the collapse of civilisation from the biggest news organisation in the world.

I’m thinking more and more about the fact that, despite right-wing columnists’ best efforts, and the delays caused by the fossil fuel industry’s sustained deception over the last few decades, this IS being reported… just not in a way that changes things in as dramatic a way as we need to survive.

What is the role of campaigning journalism here? Where is the line between informing people and urging them? How do we mend the awareness > action pipeline?

To be continued.

It’s Sunday 10th July, 2022

Media News

• The Filipino Nobel peace prize winner Maria Ressa has lost her appeal against a conviction for cyber libel. Her publication, Rappler, an ardent critic of President Duterte’s government is accused of “violating a constitutional ban on foreign ownership in securing funding, as well as tax evasion”. Ressa faces up to 6 years in prison. (The Guardian)

• Elon Musk has pulled out of his planned Twitter buyout, saying the company did not provide him with information he wanted. (CNBC)

• City Bureau, a Chicago non-profit newsroom, has been awarded $10 million to expand its ‘Documenters’ programme: in place of a shrinking number of reporters, they’ve been training citizens to attend and document public meetings and publishing their notes in a newsletter. (NiemanLab)

• Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees, has banned a Local Democracy Reporter from future press briefings for questioning his decision to fly to Canada to deliver a climate talk at TED. Rees claims “Nobody’s been banned. I didn’t invite you to my birthday party, but I didn’t ban you from it. It’s up to me.” (Bristol 24/7)

• Prince Harry has won the latest stage of his libel case against the Mail on Sunday. (BBC)

• Despite Judge Clarence Thomas’ desires, the Supreme Court will not revisit the landmark freedom of speech decision that maintains a high bar for public figures to make libel claims against media organisations. (CNN)

• Dominion, the company that makes the digital voting machines used in the US Presidential elections, is suing Fox News, Newsmax and OAN for defamation, after they ran stories claiming that the machines were rigged to “steal” the election from Trump. (Newsweek)

• In response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, forcing women to give birth against their will, Google has decided to amend a policy to allow mail-order abortion providers to list their search results with the label “provides abortion”. (Gizmodo)

• Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who previously said she was “minded to intervene” in Newsquest’s takeover of fellow regional publisher Archant, has decided not to. Newsquest is already the largest news publisher in the UK by number of titles. (Press Gazette)

• A recent Gallup poll has shown public trust in US institutions has fallen across the board, with news organisations sitting right at the bottom of the chart. The percentage of people who said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in television news is down to 11% from 16% last year, and for newspapers, down to 16% from 21%. (Gallup)

• Workers at publisher HarperCollins, owned by NewsCorp, have voted 99.5% in favour of strike action over equitable pay. The majority-women workforce also demands better family leave policies and action over diversity and inclusion; net sales were reportedly up 14% in 2021, with HarperCollins making almost $2 billion. (The MarySue)

• A year after Associated Press’ building in Gaza was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, the company announced today that its Gaza Strip offices have reopened in a new location. (AP)

• Campaigners in Arizona, including many news organisations, have been overruled in a new decision that makes it illegal for anyone within 8 feet of law enforcement activity to record police. (AZCentral)

Campaigns + Content

"The media descended... there were journalists jumping through the windows of people we knew, trying to get quotes."

The Press And The People 
Premiering July 12th

I recently spoke on a recorded panel for this film, by press freedom campaign group HackedOff, which premieres online this coming week. The 15 minute film tells the stories of people who faced relentless press intrusion after bereavement.

Sign up here to watch the film when it is launched.

“Production workers at the long-running animated television shows The Simpsons, American Dad! and Family Guy have gained voluntary recognition from their parent company, 20th Television Animation, to join The Animation Guild.

According to a statement from the union, "the production workers won with 90% support across all three shows."

Workers said they are hoping to receive benefits, such as health care and retirement, but also to change the way production work is seen in the industry.

Jobs like production supervisor, coordinator and writers assistant are often seen as stepping-stone jobs, said Ashley Cooper, a production manager for The Simpsons, even though they're integral to making sure shows get on the air.

But for many people, these jobs become careers.

"So people can wind up spending many years in something that's seen as a job for a young person to do for six months," said Cooper.”

- 'The Simpsons' production workers go union, saying they deserve a place at the table

I loved these couple of opinion pieces from NYT at the end of last month: How Animals See Themselves by Ed Yong, an Atlantic staff writer who I first came across via his excellent writing about the pandemic; and Feminism Made a Faustian Bargain With Celebrity Culture. Now It’s Paying the Price., which may resonate in particular with anyone who has read Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò‘s Elite Capture (or my review of it).

And don’t miss O’Brien’s latest rant on the terrible existence of the Daily Mail (and the UK’s client journalism at large)…

That’s all folx.

Love.Eliz

This article is a collaboration between publications of the OptOut network; editing by Alex Kotch (OptOut) and Maria Bustillos (Popula), reporting by Amy Westervelt (Drilled), video production and editing by Spencer Snyder.

A video version of this article can be found at the bottom of the page.

Who’s to blame for a lack of action on climate change?

The oil companies, most obviously:

“There’s simply no reason to take drastic action now.” - Lee Raymond, 1996

PR and ad agencies, paid to hire chipper young adults urging viewers to become “energy voters”:

“Energy! Environment! Some say it’s either/or… I don’t buy it.” - Paid actors, 2016

Politicians who carry water for the fossil fuel industry:

“Members…need to start focusing on the issues that are impacting everyday Americans, and the consequences of an overly ambitious and unrealistic climate agenda.” - Rep. Ralph Norman

These are all easy to blame.

But without the complicity of corporate and legacy media, none of the fossil fuel industry's propaganda would fly. Outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post have been allies of the fossil fuel industry for decades, not only running their ads but helping to create them.

Even now, when scientists say we’ve done irreversible damage to our planet, these and other media giants won’t give up the fossil fuel dollars. 

Creating ‘Issue Ads’ for Big Oil

When Mobil Oil and the Times teamed up to create the advertorial in the 1970s, their spin doctors admitted freely that the goal of the partnership was to "influence the influencers." In fact, part of the original legal push for corporate personhood in the U.S. stems from those early Mobil campaigns.

Mobil invented what it called “issue advertising” or "advocacy advertising" in the late 1960s and early 1970s to deal with image problems not dissimilar to those they’re facing today—gas prices were high, profits were even higher, and an oil tanker had just dumped a large amount of oil on the lovely beaches of Santa Barbara, California. Access to trusted outlets such as The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times—which worked with Mobil to publish content that helped the company establish a friendly, responsible reputation—went a long way toward painting Mobil as a corporate “good guy.”

But in 1973, something unusual happened. Mobil's PR department created TV versions of its print advertorials, and two commercial stations—CBS and ABC—declined to run them, explaining that the spots were propaganda, and that running them would be unethical and might even violate FCC regulations. Mobil execs saw this as the potential end of a strategy that had helped them win over not only the public, but also journalists and policymakers. The company launched a major offensive, placing op-eds in all the big papers, and sending flacks onto every TV and radio show to alert the public to the urgent need to protect corporate free speech rights. Mobil helped support the precursor to Citizens United (First National Bank of Boston v Bellotti), and fought hard for their right to continue using the media as their personal corporate PR machine. 

They won, as you might have guessed, and oil companies today are making the same “corporate free speech” arguments to defend their right to mislead the public on climate change. 

Amid Catastrophic Climate Change, It’s Still Happening

While there's some momentum now toward accountability for the oil company polluters and their friends in corporate media, most legacy outlets are still taking the industry’s bait. The Post is still running pay-for-play op-eds from the American Petroleum Institute, which API spokespeople amplify as though they're real articles, not just ads by another name. And when Russia began to invade Ukraine, American Petroleum Industry president Mike Sommers and Sempra Energy CEO Dan Broulette took to social media and cable TV to set the fossil fuel-friendly narrative: we need to ban Russian gas, we need to increase U.S. oil and gas production, and Biden’s climate policies raised prices at the pump.  

Only a media system addicted to fossil fuel dollars would let these dangerously destructive industries control the climate crisis narrative in order to make even more money. Now that the bill for all those long and profitable years of media complicity is coming due—when we’re faced not only with heat waves and historic floods, but also with a U.S. government that seems less prepared to deal with the problem than ever, and a Supreme Court that also seems to have consumed a steady media diet of climate delay, we may question the wisdom of trusted media institutions that chose to take the check, year after year, and ignored their responsibility to accurately inform the public when there was still time. 

This breach of trust affects every subject, not just climate. Should we believe coverage of wars that is sponsored by the weapons industry? Should we trust Covid-19 reporting funded by Big Pharma?

Read more

It’s my favourite time of the year (bar, maybe, Christmas)—Sheffield DocFest! The largest documentary festival in the UK takes place over six days, an impressive, extensive (and expensive) event far more than just a bill of screenings and parties. DocFest is a primary bit of scaffolding for our international creative infrastructure, a key juncture in the calendar for the development of visual journalism and factual entertainment.

I haven’t been to a DocFest since 2017, and so this year’s tagline—‘ReConnect with Documentary’—was a welcome, if generic, post-COVID brand.

But beyond a simple tagline, DocFest was indeed an example of another post-COVID reunion for a temporarily-stunted industry; it was lovely to see several people I haven’t seen in years, but just that bit more important was the festival’s connection with Ukrainian festival DocuDays, to host what would have been its headline films and projects in development. The DocuDays website explains:

“The 19th Docudays UA was supposed to take place on 25 March – 3 April 2022, but was postponed due to the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The festival will take place after the victory of Ukraine.”

Sheffield’s international eminence is not lost on attendees. “Sheffield is the main festival for industry. I attend most of the festivals in the UK, and others in the country focus on the public screening programme, which works in their favour—it means they’re not competing,” says Lynn Nwokorie, an executive producer who has worked on three of the films in this year’s festival. “You come to Sheffield if you want to have meetings.”

Sheffield’s focus on the documentary ‘product’ is genuinely exciting and enriching. But like the rest of the industry it doesn’t seem to have got its head around real progressive change. One session, titled “Sustainable Film Production for a Sustainable Future”, was hosted by a streaming company that framed its petition links and awareness-raising via social media views as ‘direct action’. Its panel was made up of three Middle-Class White Guys (really nice guys, but come on) showing clips from documentaries they’d made about nature, who didn’t address any systemic sustainability questions until they came up in the Q&A. The session ran within 48 hours of the following headlines:

Australia ‘ill-prepared’ for food insecurity driven by war and climate crisis, former defence leaders say

Weather tracker: Europe’s heatwave sends temperature records tumbling

Extreme heat causes train derailment outside San Francisco

UN chief warns of 'catastrophe' from global food shortage

I’ll complain some more about systemic issues later. Let’s chat about films! 🫠🫠🫠

The festival’s opener, Moonage Daydream, was a collage film of Bowie’s music and performances; not a traditional documentary, in reflection of Bowie’s less than traditional career.

Fans will love the film. Like Bowie as an artist, deeper meaning can be found or you can simply let it wash over you; either way can be a joy. I admit that I look forward to watching it at my leisure without director Brett Morgen live-mixing it from the back of the room at punishingly loud volume; earplugs were apparently being given out on the doors (I didn’t see any) and several people (who presumably didn’t either) left. I wished the team had refused to indulge him and just let Bowie do his thing - he’s more than capable, as Morgen well knows.

Almost every other film I chose to see happened to be in the ‘Debates’ strand, a solid demonstration of my obsession with socio-political (or ‘issues-based’) documentary. My schedule was a fraction of what was on offer, but I was more than happy with my choices:

The Happy Worker - or How Work Was Sabotaged is a crowd-pleasing, satirically upbeat feature about the similarities between the operations of an average workplace and the US government’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual. David Graeber of ‘Bullshit Jobs’ fame (RIP) and Christina Maslach of UC Berkeley (who coined the term ‘burnout’) are two core contributors, alongside workers who have had breakdowns and/or chronic stress responses to doing admin inside a box for 37.5 hours a week. Tied together by some shocking stats, joyful animations and dream sequences of krumping office workers, it’s a fun trad-doc with something to say.

Immediately afterwards I was treated to a presentation on Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa’s installation Black Power Naps, which reclaims rest, relaxation and, why not, laziness as a revolutionary, transformative act. People of colour are less likely to get enough sleep, more likely to suffer from sleep disorders, and all resulting problems; the inspiring, soothing presentation from Acosta and Sosa holds the tagline ‘At Black Power Naps, rest is waiting for you! With the full support of your local white institutions’. (This white institution didn’t do enough to prepare us for the fact the installation itself wasn’t in session, only the video presentation.)

Then came a slate of work about gender and, loosely, the so-called culture wars (back in my day, it was just called ‘thinking oppression is bad and Tories disagreeing with you’). Two biopics, Nothing Compares and My Name is Andrea, reframed for me the work of Sinead O’Connor and Andrea Dworkin respectively, given that I’d absolutely swallowed the party line about them both.

Share

I’d deemed Sinead O’Connor irrelevant outside Nothing Compares 2 U and ripping up a photo of the Pope. Visual evidence proved me wrong (this is two weeks post-Pope-rip):

“I like Andrea Dworkin but I’m not down with the anti-sex thing” has been my go-to line since I first heard of her and, again, visual evidence proved me wrong. I couldn’t find the clip of Dworkin on Donahue that director Pratibha Parmar used, which The Hollywood Reporter calls “a telling illustration of the line-blurring confusion that frequently greeted the author’s work”:

[Donahue] continually tells Dworkin what she means, over her calm objections to his reductive interpretation (“Intercourse is bad”). And then there are the comments from the audience. One caller labels Dworkin “very angry and lonely.” Another asks, with a self-satisfied blend of condescension and judgment, “What tragic thing happened in your life that made you feel this way?”

Dworkin is “saying women should stop having sex”, Donahue opines angrily into his microphone. “That’s news to me, by the way” Andrea retorts. I’ve never read Intercourse, the book they’re discussing—something which Donahue and others were, of course, banking on and encouraging.

A complement to these works about shunned women, Céline Pernet’s documentary journey to better understand the modern male perspective, Garçonnières, was a fairly basic talking-head setup, but gave insight. Pernet’s willingness to respect and challenge her interviewees in equal measure resulted in a friendly collaboration in which the interviewees were universally vulnerable. A genuine desire to understand masculinity and men better meant asking questions men tend not to get asked. The result was a testament to Pernet’s skill as an interviewer rather than as an artistically conceptual director.

The corruption of Big Pharma was highlighted by two films: first, The Family Statement, another innovative, spartan short from production company Field of Vision (founded by Laura Poitras of CitizenFour). We’re given fascinating, often banal snippets of a WhatsApp chat between members of the billionaire Sackler Family, owners of Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, discussing how and when to make a statement about their company’s misconduct. (Purdue, under the leadership of Richard Sackler, marketed Oxycontin as ‘safe and non-addictive’, then encouraged doctors to over-prescribe in increasingly high doses, single-handedly driving the opioid crisis in the US.)

In the feature-length As Prescribed, a similar story is emerging about benzodiazepines; Valium et al have been ruining people’s lives plenty while US doctors prescribe them like sweets, without informed consent, despite pleas from patients and local lawmakers. Another fairly straightforward actuality doc, following a handful of characters crippled by the effects of benzos, it was informative and moving.

And while we’re on the subject of deadly corporate greed, the stand-out film was The Oil Machine. Rather than another doc that doomscrolls through the ways we’re about to die from global heating, this film by Scottish director Emma Davie reveals the UK’s “hidden infrastructure of oil from the offshore rigs and the buried pipelines to its flow through the stock markets of London.”

It was the first time I’ve ever been interested in the minutiae of pension plans.

Producer Sonja Henrici calls DocFest “a crucial event for the film’s journey” for the way it will introduce the film to both audiences and industry. “As soon as we launched we got interest from other festivals worldwide, sales agents… Sheffield gives a certain stamp of approval. It’s a big piece of the puzzle, with a particular type of clout”.

I asked about the ‘impact campaign’ that issues-based films are required to have these days: “We didn’t want to create a new campaign - there are so many climate campaigns out there and we’re talking to so many different communities in the film [e.g. oil rig workers, fossil fuel insurers, climate activists]. We wanted to pull those communities into screenings, have them host screenings and bring them together, and work with people in the film to see what their recommendations are”.

Partly funded by the BBC, The Oil Machine will be screened by the broadcaster sometime around the end of the year.

Returning to the power dynamics of the event, I want to be fair to the organisers, who genuinely appear to be dedicated to interrogating the industry’s imbalances. I spoke to Rebecca Day, a panellist for the ‘Beyond Centres of Power’ session, a former documentary producer who now runs Film in Mind, an initiative to provide therapeutic services for creatives. Day expressed frustration at the lack of reciprocation from power-holders:

It's heartening to see how many festivals are beginning to include panels on mental health, ethics, power etc into their programming. [Sheffield DocFest] is a key time when the industry all comes together as a whole to collaborate and discuss things. By offering these sessions, DocFest is engaging in the conversation, which is the start of the change that is needed but it was frustrating to see that people in the position to actually act on the needed changes were not in the room… I wonder how we can encourage them to show up to these conversations?

Me too.

Finally, on the accessibility question, I’ve previously criticised DocFest for steep costs. In 2016, I pitched the overall individual spend for an attendee at around £750; this year, producer Geoff Arborne of Inside Out Films told me, it was over £1,000.

“The only reason many filmmakers are able to come is the national delegation process,” he told me. Small groups of filmmakers, ‘delegations’, from certain countries will be funded by their BFI equivalent— this year saw delegations from Chile, Ukraine, Sudan, among others (plus…Cornwall). “There are very few spaces, of course, and so you have to be lucky, or know someone, to get a spot”.

No shade to Past Me, but in 2016 I was an angry young person who had just shelled out several hundred crucial pounds to attend, on top of the discount provided to my film network. I didn’t know about the delegation process (I learned about it this year, from Geoff) and having volunteered twice before, I didn’t consider it a great option, given the restrictions to what you could experience outside your set shifts.

But Kat Padmore, a volunteer at this year’s festival, told me their experience exceeded expectations:

…we're highly encouraged to see as many films as we like and can get into screenings fairly easily. The team really encourage us to enjoy outside of volunteering, and some of my team have seen over half the schedule so far! The team have been communicative, appreciative and a genuine joy to work with.

The event is meant for industry professionals; alongside volunteers and delegates, it’s assumed that the majority of costs will be absorbed by employers such as BBC, Channel 4, Netflix.

But in my conversation with EP Lynn Nwokorie, I was reminded of the heavy ratio of freelancers in this industry. “Trying to navigate being in all those places you need to be can feel like an obstacle,” Lynn says. “I do feel that institutions like Sheffield are trying to make it as accessible as possible; they have different kinds of passes, for example, but there are people who can’t afford to be here and it has nothing to do with talent. My feeling is there is acknowledgement of it throughout the industry, but the wheels are moving a bit too slowly in addressing it.”

As an angry person now approaching middle-age, I can see the nuances of the situation far better. I’m unwilling to put the blame at any one person’s door, but I wouldn’t mind much more realistic tiered ticketing to provide for young indies who want the commissioning opportunities the industry say they’re eager to give, and a serious, radical approach to discussions on urgent issues such as sustainability.

If the creative industry wants to survive and really move beyond existing centres of power, direct action needs to be taken—not hearted, thumbs-upped, or discussed at a roundtable of familiar faces.

Thank you for subscribing! Paying £5 ($7) a month helps to support my work. Please feel free to share this post 👇👇👇

Share